Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (19 page)

He’d just taken the last swallow of biting, clear liquor when he caught a glimpse of the man he’d seen talking to his mother earlier. The man haunted the edges of the biolume light, in the shadows of a rough alcove, but when Grey reached the alcove, the man was gone.

Grey scanned the area. The man didn’t reappear and he felt an odd disappointment—given that he didn’t believe the man had anything, and, if he did, that they should have anything to do with it.

He considered his options. Back to the bar and a possible hook-up or back to the show grounds to let his mother know the guy had skipped. With a rueful glance back to the pool of colored light and bodies, Grey made for the exit.

He kept to the main track through the town, retracing his steps along the packed dirt thoroughfare. Quiet took the place of the stillery’s friendly noise, the dark between hulking buildings barely leavened by the occasional floating biolumes that showed him ruts in the track and steps up or down to doorways.

A flicker of movement caught his eye as he passed an alley. Grey paused, peering into the dark. The back of his neck prickled.

He made out just the edge of a fire escape. A fleck of shadow moved and then the man stepped out of the shadows. He had a hand tucked inside his loose vest, cradling something at chest level. He was very tall, only appearing to be thin because of that height, with shaven head and beard at the same stage of dark stubble. He crooked one finger of his free hand to Grey, coming no further out of the alley himself.

When Grey hesitated, he pulled his hand out of his vest slowly. A smudge of something sat on his palm; then he threw the hand up and the smudge became a blurred, hovering movement of wings with a tiny body at its nexus. Grey wasn’t sure if he was looking at a monstrous insect or a tiny bird. Suddenly it darted close to Grey, making him duck back. Whatever it was hovered at eye level and the buzz of its wings thrilled over his skin briefly before it darted away to hover elsewhere. He lost sight of it until the man, squeezing several drops of something onto his hand, held his palm up in the air again and the creature darted back to land.

Grey found he’d stepped into the alley, his gaze on the bird. “It’s biological?”

“Entirely.”

Grey glanced around. No wonder the man was so furtive; the tiny bird, if truly pure biological, was illegal enough to get him locked away for years.

“They usually go into partial hibernation in the night,” he said, stroking the tiny bundle of feathers with one finger before slipping it back into his vest. “So this one’s sleepy.”

Questions crowded Grey’s mind. Before he could ask any of them, the man turned, saying, “Follow me.”

Grey shook his head. Not safe. But he recalled that hovering, darting form, the breeze of its wings as it hovered close, buzzing the air, barely glimpsed details of needle beak and iridescence in the feathers. The sense of fragility and . . . something he didn’t know how to name.

Even if it wasn’t pure biological, he thought, shying from the feeling he couldn’t name, it was remarkable—he’d never seen a flighted biomech bird of such artistry.

He followed.

The man stayed several steps ahead, moving quickly down one narrow track and then another. Grey set his link to map the way and hurried to keep up. They didn’t go far before the man stopped at a metal door. He palmed the chemical lock and pushed the door open, slipping quickly inside and almost shutting the door on Grey in his hurry to close it.

Inside, Grey followed him through a dingy kitchen into an open room with a sagging couch and a low table, a curtained doorway through which Grey glimpsed the little girl, an abandoned sprawl of skinny limbs. He thought she was asleep, but then caught the gleam of her eyes, watching him pass.

The man disappeared through another doorway. Following, Grey stumbled to a halt as he crossed into a space that opened up two or three stories above, a kind of silo filled with vegetation, reaching toward the simulated sunlight of a kind of lighting Grey had never seen. The air was a fug of green and rot, warm and dank like the inside of a tank garden. The heavy vegetation hung over makeshift lab tables, grimy scientific equipment, and the grisly artifacts of failed speciation work. The remains of dissected creatures of flesh and blood, strange, twisted things of paw and tail, floated in jars. The carcass of something was draped over a row of cryo storage units.

But up in the riot of tree and vine leaves, among gouts of flowers—red trumpets and spurts of little blue blossoms trailing from wedges of soil suspended on wire ledges in the trees—there, several tiny birds hovered and darted, filling the air with their buzz and whirr.

Watching them, Grey swayed, dizzy in the heat of the place. This slice of contained jungle overwhelmed him in a way their tank garden never had. It pulled at Grey. It confused him, tugging at something inside that was unfamiliar, alarming.

A buzz in the air and one of the tiny brown birds hovered just beyond his reach, at eye level, needle beak and seed eye black and keen, its wings a blur of motion. It darted up, zipping through the air too fast to trace until it came to a whirring hover at a trailing vine of the red trumpets, inserting its long, slender black beak deftly into one blossom after another. It had a white frill and bronzy green iridescence distinguished its brown feathers.

“They’re used to coming to humans—the sugar scent I put on my hands earlier, that’s how I train them, as much as they can be trained.”

“But, why would you . . . ” Grey gestured.

“Why what? Risk prosecution and imprisonment?” He rubbed a long hand over his stubbled head. “Or, perhaps, why bother with such messy work at all?” He gestured to the jars, the carcass on the storage units. “It’s fraught with failure and disappointment, after all. And pain . . . theirs and mine.”

There was a pad of feet behind him and Grey turned to see the little girl. Her name, he remembered, was Anna. She climbed up onto the table next to a line of jars with twisted things floating in them. She took a scanbook from under one arm and unrolled it, dragging a finger down the slick surface. Then she read from it, as if at a school lesson, something read often, though she tripped over some words, lisping others. Grey recognized it as a passage from a book his mother sometimes read to him when he was a child.

“The animals were lost. The largest to the smallest, the cats, the dogs, the bears, the pa . . . pachy-derms; gazelle, giraffe, hippo, hyena, hare; the apes and lemurs, marsupials and rodentia; the reptilian, lizard, crocodile, snake, and their cousins, the birds, kestrel, plover, swan, robin, owl, and heron; the frogs, that wore mutation like port—portent—for generations before they left the world for good; coral, crustacean, mollusk, plankton. A slow motion catast . . . ropy—”

“Catast
rophe
,” her father interrupted.

“—catastrophe took the world. The species surviving wrought havoc on the world; famine and plague winnowed the humans to a fragment of their former numbers.

“The animals were lost and one night a woman, in hungry dream, found their representative in a wood—”

“That’s very good, Anna, but that’s enough for now.”

“Okay, Da.” She let the scan roll back up and crossed her legs under her nightshirt, looking at Grey. “It says why,” she said to him, as if confidentially, “why my Da does this.”

Her father continued. “Yes, scientists are at work in other places, under government auspice, bringing back what they can of all we lost in the collapse. In clean, controlled environments, regulated by arbiters of policy who argue endlessly, and have vested interests in what fauna, what flora, and when and who will benefit from it.”

He spoke gently, despite the tenor of his words, and his hands and arms traced gestures on the air, intense gaze holding Grey.

“In clean white labs and controlled preserves, they work to bring back our lost biodiversity, strictly regulating the work. But it’s work that belongs to all of us. What I do is illegal, yes. But what they do in their labs is no more real than the counterfeit life of the things in your show.”

Grey flinched, thinking of Franche, then of the diorama in the stillery.

“Life,” the man turned, arms out, “life is dirty, painful,
bloody
—invention can be marvelous—like biomech creatures—but it isn’t life.” He looked up at the darting birds. “They’re so fragile when first born; they can be hurt, they can die so easily. Making a place for them to live, to grow, to flourish . . . how can you ask why?” His voice had gotten very soft, and Grey strained to hear him, stepping closer.

He was unsure what to say to the man’s ardent words, the expectant expression on his face. “Why did you talk to my mother?”

“I need help in spreading the work. Your show travels. Under cover of your clockwork beasts, your ersatz forest, my real creatures and seeds can be taken far. There are people waiting for them, with gardens and habitats in the wastes. We have a network. Your mother, I think, is sympathetic to this cause.”

Thinking about it, about his mother, Grey had to agree. His gaze was drawn back to the birds.

“What are they?” he asked, watching one hover at a flower, dipping its needle slender beak within, an unlikely, thrilling piece of theater.

“Flower kissers!” Anna said.

“Hummingbirds,” the man said. “Brown Incas, mostly, with some other bits.”

Grey watched them, just tiny brown birds—startling, living things of aerodynamic wonder.

“Here.” The man took Grey’s hand in his own and squeezed several drops of clear liquid onto his hand out of a small vial. He mimed holding the hand flat, palm up.

Grey watched one of the hummingbirds drop from the air, straight down to land on his open palm: a tiny, near weightless puff of warm feathers, flight muscle, and fragile bone. Its tiny claws pricked his skin. It hit him like sudden rain into desert, soaking down to wake a long-dormant seed; the seed’s carapace cracking to that touch was pain, the pale, blind shoot of life threading forth, wonder.

One black eye looked at Grey as he looked at it.

Looked at him, and saw him.

As Franche never had, never would.

Study, for Solo Piano

Genevieve Valentine

This is how it might have gone:

The Circus Tresaulti spent the winter on the road, Ayar the strong man knocking the stakes into the ground when it was frozen over.

They bartered for liquor to keep warm, and when spring came they pushed the trucks through the mud to save oil, and everything went on as before, and nothing broke.

But that was the winter they found the house.

The mansion stands more than two miles from the city walls, far enough that the looters have given up, and it’s been left to rot so long that the city’s children wouldn’t understand it’s a house.

The windows go first, from enemy fire and bad frosts. Then the moss and ivy move in, and the birds, and the rain. At last, the brick begins to crumble.

By the time the Circus comes, it will be a ruin.

But by the time the Circus comes, the storm has been raging for days, and the house rises up from the road, and Boss thinks, We must rest here, there’s no way to go on.

“Stop,” says Boss, and the Circus stops.

The Circus waits in leaking trailers while Boss takes her lieutenants through the house.

Then, her lieutenants are Elena from the trapeze, and Panadrome the music man, who presses his accordion bellows tight to his side to keep it from sharp edges, and Alec, their final act, who folds his gleaming wings tight against his back so he can fit through the hole in the wall.

Inside, the ceiling is waterlogged and sagging, but when Alec opens his wings even the nails sing for him.

Alec laughs, and the birds in the rafters scatter as if he’s called them down.

(Alec will be dead in a year; these are the last birds he sees.)

They split up to cover ground; the house was grand, before it went to seed.

What Boss sees: five rooms with floors that haven’t rotted through; a ballroom with a chandelier still hanging; three bathrooms with copper pipes intact behind the stone. (She can see metal right through walls, by now.)

What Boss does not see: Alec in a dining room with only a sideboard left, silhouetted against wallpaper that was green once. He faces a painting of a banquet, but his head is lowered. His wings are folded; he is still.

Elena stands behind him. Her forehead rests on his bare back, in the cradle between the wings. Her eyes are closed; her skin becomes pinker, as if she’s waking from a long sleep.

(His wings are tall. They swallow her.)

Panadrome is beside the piano when Boss finds him.

One of the legs has collapsed, dropping the higher registers to the ground, and a few keys sank with the impact, but otherwise it’s pristine.

He holds a blanket in his skeleton fingers, and the piano is free of dust; long ago someone, in their terror, still risked a kindness to a beautiful thing.

“We’ll stay here,” Boss says.

He doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He thinks the Circus might fall apart if it stops.

After too long he says, “As you like.”

“You think it’s not safe?”

Alec comes in, and Elena a few moments later.

“If you want us to live in an obstacle course,” Elena says, “you’ve found the right place.”

Boss says, “They can use the mess to shore up the holes, then. Call them.”

Elena scowls and goes.

Alec smiles at Boss, holds out a hand. “Did you see the dining hall? There’s a painting of a banquet, in case you forget what room you’re in.”

A moment later Panadrome is alone, one hand on the piano, pulling in breath he doesn’t need.

Boss has a knack for skeletons.

Panadrome has never asked to have his silver hands covered over (though more than once Boss brought back someone’s hands, still bleeding, and asked, “You need a pair of gloves?”).

He is proud of the slender phalanges, the slightly curved metatarsals, the wrist joints always dark with oil. It is a testament to her art, and he would never dream of covering it.